Jean-Baptiste Bres

Chief Information Security Officer

Disaster Recovery is a complex exercise. For the few of us who had to manage a crisis and ensure a full recovery of critical business activities, we know that despite all the planning, testing and simulation we have done, there are always elements we did not foresee.

In August 2018, the Reserve Bank of Australia faced a disruption to the power supplying the data centre at one of its site (primary and backup) due to a vendor error. Then multiple factors, from super-high security to plain bad luck, made the recovery difficult, and the bank did not manage to recover within their recovery time objective (RTO). This article details the extent of the events. It is a very interesting story for everybody interested in continuity and disaster recovery. And also kudo to the RBA for the retrospective analysis of their own efforts, their honesty about what did not go as well as planned, and their transparency in sharing their findings with the rest of the industry.